Maximum sustainable yield of Greater lizardfish Saurida tumbil fishery in Pakistan using the CEDA and ASPIC packages

The catch and effort data analysis (CEDA) and ASPIC (a stock assessment production model incorporating covariates) computer software packages were used to estimate the maximum sustainable yield (MSY) from the catch and effort data of Greater lizardfish Saurida tumbil fishery of Pakistan from 1986 to 2009. In CEDA three surplus production models of Fox, Schaefer and Pella-Tomlinson were used. Here initial proportion (IP) of 0.5 was used because the starting catch was roughly 50% of the maximum catch. With IP = 0.5, the estimated MSY from Fox model were 20.59 mt and 38.16 mt for normal and log-normal error assumptions, while the MSY from Schaefer and Pella-Tomlinson were 60.40, 60.40 and 60.40 mt, for normal, log-normal and gamma error assumptions respectively. The MSY values from Schaefer and Pella-Tomlinson models of three error assumptions were the same. The R2 values from those three models were above 0.6. When IP = 0.5, the MSY values estimated from ASPIC from Fox were 132 mt, and from logistic model were 69.4 mt, with R2 value above 0.8. Therefore we suggest the MSY of S. tumbil fishery from Pakistan to be 60–70 mt, which is higher than the latest catch, thus we would recommend that the fishing efforts for this fishery may be kept at the current level.